Field Notes with Lewis Girvin, Northern Europe Field Marketing Manager at Seedtag

Could you tell us a little bit about you and your role?

I’m Lewis, the Northern Europe Field Marketing Manager at Seedtag, a contextual advertising company, and I look after marketing in the UK, Germany, France and Benelux. I come from a green technology background, solar panels, car chargers ect. My role today is focused on accelerating growth across Europe.

 

How did you get into marketing? 

I kind of fell into marketing. I studied physiotherapy at university and never practised, I moved out to Australia and New Zealand, and was really involved in events like wine festivals, beer festivals, and concerts across the southern hemisphere. I came back to the UK, five years ago, and got an events role in a marketing team, basically running trade shows and similar types of events. That quickly evolved into taking on more and more responsibility within the marketing team, and now I’m here.

 

Tell me a little bit about Seedtag–What they do, and then your role there?
We’re a contextual advertising company. Our main clients are advertising agencies across the world. We started about 10 years ago in Madrid. About three years ago, we got some private investment and moved into America, which has done really well. About a year ago, we put more focus on the European market. The UK is probably the biggest market outside of the States, so they hired me to look after marketing and a new managing director. Right now, we’re focusing on building the brand in the UK, and leveraging our strong footprint around the world. 

 

What would you say is your biggest challenge today, as a field marketer, coming into a new market and trying to build that brand?

Budget constraints – trying to do everything and stand out at the same time with limited resources, both time and money is the biggest challenge. Standing out in a world where there is a lot of big budgets, when you have limited cash flow is super difficult. You’ve got to really tweak those creative switches.

 

We’re going to talk a little bit about marketing and sales, because we’re always so interested in that conversation. Out of everything that you’re doing at SeedTag, what do you think the sales team is more excited about and less excited about? Do they see more value in events and what you’re doing, or in traditional white papers and that sort of lead generation?

We work really closely with the sales guys to find out what they value and what works best. They obviously love person-to-person interaction. They don’t really see the value in building a brand because it doesn’t directly impact sales for them. So it’s all about performance marketing and short-term returns. But that’s our job as marketers, right? It’s to make sure that they understand and see the long-term results, because you’ve got to build a brand long term, but you’ve also got to have a hand in short-term returns.

 

When you’re dealing with sales all the time, how much input or back-and-forth do you have? If you go to them and say, “I have this idea, is that something you’d be interested in?” or do they come to you and pitch and suggest?

Oh, definitely both. I love to hear ideas from everybody on the team. The sales guys know their clients best. So, in terms of doing an event or a small activation within an agency, the sales guys know what they want and what they enjoy. Having an open ear to them is super important, and I try to listen to them all the time. We have one-on-one calls with the sales directors every month, and whenever I’m in the office, I try to have as few virtual meetings as possible so that I’m always available to talk to them, letting them know what’s going on in my world and finding out what’s going on in theirs. Collaboration is key. 

I’ve found it really difficult with the other markets. We have slack and video calls, but getting out to those markets, like once a quarter or so, and talking to them, is incredibly important. 

 

Which marketing strategy at SeedTag do you think has been the most successful from the sales team’s perspective?

We spent a lot of time at the beginning of this year taking our overarching corporate strategy and really refining it into a local strategy. The overarching themes are there, but each market is so different. We spent so much time looking at the markets, the individual challenges, and strategising what would be best for each market. For example, If you know anything about the German market, it’s decentralised, so we had to get our people in front of our demand audience. Team calls don’t quite cut it, especially when you’re talking about £100,000 to £250,000 budgets over a quarter. You have to be there in person. We recognised that as a challenge; so we took a lot of budget out of industry events and focused heavily on getting our sales team in front of the buyers. Similarly, we looked at the UK, and the sales team is doing an unbelievable job with that person-to-person interaction. So we really needed to build the brand. We’re looking at a more strategic approach in terms of industry events, PR is a massive focus for us, and making sure we’re positioning ourselves as a thought leader in the market.

 

Who is your ICP? Who do you want the sales team to be in front of – your ideal client?

We have a range of people within advertising agencies we target. We obviously have a really high focus on those mid-level planners and activation teams – as well as senior-level execs for more long-term engagement. At the same time, CMOs within brands are important. While we always activate our service through an agency, speaking to and training the brands on what our product is plays a crucial role, because the agencies don’t always have a deep understanding of what we do. So, having the opportunity to talk to brands directly, alongside the agency, is obviously very important.

 

What’s on the cards for events this year? 

So, we’re actually just about to kick off our first major global omnichannel campaign for Seedtag. Everything from field, digital, PR, socials – everybody’s involved. It’s been a pretty hectic three or four months in the build-up, and we go live in May. There are a number of events involved in that, there’s an event called Programmatic Pioneers in the UK, we’re hosting our own Seedtag summit in Madrid, we’re part of the Cannes Lions festival of creativity. 

We’ve got partners with major trade media outlets throughout the whole eight to ten-week period. So yes, that’s what’s happening, and it’s going to be a pretty busy few months.

It’s the first time we’ve ever done something on this scale, all with one single piece of messaging. The concept kind of came from the fact that we lived and died by each event, and we needed some longevity. So yes, July and August are going to be very, very slow and full of reporting.

 

Okay, so what’s the most successful event you’ve hosted, and why? What do you think made it so successful? Success can be measured in any way you see fit.

We have a thing we do in the UK: if we’re on stage, we don’t talk about Seedtag. A couple of months ago, we went to MadFest North in Manchester, the first MadFest up north. It was probably the biggest, most well-attended marketing event outside of London in the UK. We did exactly that; we didn’t talk about SeedTag. We invited some of our big clients to sit on a panel and talk about the challenges they were seeing. 

There’s a lot of discussion about marketing outside of London not being quite as good as in London, and there are obviously a lot of budgets being stripped and put into London agencies, especially in the creative world. 

So yes, we basically just gave our clients the platform to share their successes. It was really successful for us in a couple of different ways, but the reach we gained from just having those names on stage with us was tenfold what we would get if one of our sales guys did a sales pitch. There wasn’t even a nod to what Seetag do as a company. It was just understanding the challenges, giving them a platform to speak about them, and following up by saying, “These are the three things we should be doing right now, and this is what we’re going to do.” It was really authentic and showed everybody that we were there.

 

In terms of exposure, and obviously when you are in field marketing and event marketing, and you’re trying to secure those budgets that are unfortunately always small and difficult, how do you calculate ROI or justify ROI internally when you’re asking for a certain amount for an event because you’ll get this return?

It’s a question that everybody gets asked. There are obviously attribution calculations that are widely used. I don’t think there’s one that works in B2B marketing, to be honest, because we’re just one touchpoint. I think there’s actually a statistic that says 77 touchpoints are needed for a B2B sale to close. Marketing is maybe half of those, potentially, or potentially not even involved. So, the attribution calculations for a hard ROI KPI are, in my opinion, misleading. Telling your board of investors that we’re building a brand and there’s no hard ROI is a pretty difficult conversation to have, but I think if you understand the value of a brand and you can portray that message to your superiors, then that’s what you should do. For me, everything I do, especially in events, is based around top of the funnel, reach and impressions 

I can ask my sales team to put a number on the pipeline after an event. That’s probably the best you’re going to get, to be completely honest. I can check in with them in six months’ time and see if they actually close any of that business and say, “Hey, look, we met this new person, and this is how much they were worth.” But I think the sales team in that period probably does the bulk of the work.  We can go into your CRM and have a play around and check in, but it’s not really that accurate. Am I giving myself 100% attribution if somebody meets a client at an event? Yes, sure, because that makes me look good. Is it the truth? Maybe not.

If you do marketing without sales, you’re never going to sell a product. If you do sales without marketing, you’re never going to sell the product.

 

Right? Okay, so we’re going to move on to some of the last questions. So what career advice would you give to someone who is just getting into marketing now?

Be prepared to be out of your comfort zone. People say you need to learn how to say no, but for me, saying yes has led to so much more growth and so many more opportunities. Yes, there have been situations where I should have said no, but the amount of growth from those failures… You never know something’s going to be a failure until you actually try it out. 

If you’re not out of your comfort zone, you’re not learning, you’re not growing, and marketing is a place where you can learn an awful lot, in a short amount of time.

You’ve got to learn to say no sometimes. If your mental health requires that you take on no more work, then say no. But saying no just because you don’t think you can do it is a pretty silly reason.

 

What do you think is the biggest advantage, or rather the biggest opportunity, we now have in 2025 in field marketing and event marketing that didn’t exist maybe five or ten years ago? 

I think the world is a cyclical place. Everything comes back around. It’s really easy as a marketer today to look on LinkedIn, see what someone with 10,000 followers has said, and just implement it into your strategy without looking back at what has traditionally worked. Social media is a scary place. LinkedIn, for me, is somewhere I learn from, but you’ve got to take some things with a pinch of salt. You can’t change your marketing strategy six months into the year just because you read a buzzword or a new structure. I read something a couple of days ago where someone was justifying the fact that consideration was no longer part of the funnel. It was just like, “Sure.” But how many 25-year-old marketers have read that and gone to their boss and said, “Hey, we should change our strategy and forget about consideration”?

I think we’ve got to be really careful, honour what works, and strip everything back to basics. That’s what I do. Meanwhile always thinking, How do we pave our way forward and lead, not follow?

Obviously, innovation is super key. But there are only so many times I can relearn the names of the funnel before I just go back to the original names. 

 

What do you think the future of event marketing looks like?

I think it will look much the same, honestly. What we do is about people. As marketers, we understand people and try to talk to them. People aren’t going to change. The way they consume content will, of course, change and continue to change, but people will always have interests. People will always want to talk to people. As field marketers, that’s what we do, and I don’t think we should try to change that. I think it’s going to look very similar in 15 years as it did 10 or 15 years ago.

Technology advances, and the way people consume content changes. People used to read the newspaper, and now they read everything online. On the open web, there’s TikTok, so everybody looks at 15-second video snippets. But the crux of what we do is talking to people; that will always be a constant, and that’s what we should focus on. If, in 15 years, we have the opportunity to fly somebody to space, that’s an unforgettable experience. Right now, we’re still trying to provide an unforgettable experience – we just can’t send them to space yet. 

 

Last question: In one word, how would you describe the role of a field marketer?

People. I’ve talked about it a lot just then, but marketing is all about people and understanding your target market and how to provide them with an unforgettable experience.